Captain Scarlet

I'm not sure of the name of the plug that fits into the AZ-EQ5, but I have some spare ones. I have an AZ-EQ6 which has the same plug, and I had the same problem, hence me ordering more! I now have 2 or 3 leads each with the AZ-EQxx plug at one end, and different connectors at the other. When I ordered the extra ones, from AliExpress or similar, I vaguely recall 5 being the minimum order.

The upshot is, if you want a couple of extra ones, and don't mind doing a bit of soldering to attach them to leads, I'll happily post them to you, and even more happily, I'm in Ireland myself (Baltimore, West Cork) so no customs forms to get wrong. No charge, I'm happy to help a fellow astronomer.

PM me if that's of interest.

Cheers, Magnus

Personally I find that the stock plastic RDF as supplied with many scopes is perfectly fine. I still use it attached to my skymax 180.

M

How many people actually relish power cuts? We’ve just had one, in the middle of one actually. First thing I did was rush outside with my SQM-L meter only to find it low-cloudy. Waste of a good cut 😕🙂

Another challenge for a 60mm-class scope: Polaris B. When I was near London, I had my 62mm spotting scope on a SkyTee2 alongside an 8" newt. Polaris B was quite plain to see in the 8", but I just couldn't get it in the Leica. Now I'm in a much darker place, but I don't yet have my 62mm to hand to try the same comparison under the dark skies.

Magnus

Superb! I'm very much looking forward to trying for the HH again with the experience of my attempts last Orion-season. And the Aurora! No chance for me from SW Ireland obviously but I do have a sister-in-law who lives in North Antrim.

Magnus

Wow that's dedication. And sometimes, dedication pays off! Well done, I'm not jealous at all (I lie).

M

1 hour ago, Pompey Monkey said:

In that case, surely it's a 304.8 mm f6? 😇

The Skywatcher 300p is in fact 305mm (at least, mine was). Whereas the Orion Optics VX12 and CT12 are 300mm diameter!!

Was it visible naked eye? If so I'll use the app to alert my sister-in-law and her family on the coast in North Antrim.

Magnus

My copy of Sidgwick has the following page, which although it’s the 1980 edition suggests that almost everything dates to the 1971 edition:

42 minutes ago, RobertI said:

Nice haul! I had a look at M36, 37 and 38 in my last session with my little 130P. I missed the red star in M37 - will look out for that one. I did spot the faint cluster NGC1907 in the same FOV as M38 - that was a nice surprise.  

Thanks for that I’ll make sure to look for NGC 1907 next time. I recall you mentioning it in a report I think but didn’t note it down.

It’s been nearly two months since I last set up my OO-Helmerichs 12”, but last night I managed it. There was a 2-3 night patch in last month’s Moon-down cycle but I wasn’t able to take advantage of them. I decided last night to set up on my North-facing view. Jupiter and Saturn are too far West these days for my South vista, and Orion is not yet early enough. Besides, I haven’t looked North for a long time.

I went out fairly early, before dinner, to take the tube out to cool and was pleased to see the sky was really dark and clear. Delphinus, just left of Aquila, in particular leapt out in a way I haven’t noted before. I was excited for later. Slightly disappointingly, after dinner, by the time I had finished setting up (20-30 minutes), the sky although still clear had a milkiness to it that wasn’t there before. The forecast admittedly had been for light mist perhaps fog to emerge, so I wasn’t too surprised. However, by no means enough to prevent my session. My SQM-L said 21.3 instead of the expected 21.5 for the conditions.

Another result of not having addressed this scope for such a long time was the fact that when inspecting it down the tube with a bright torch, the tube was filled with hundreds of tiny spider-web filaments, a particularly dense patch of web just on one edge of the mirror, and an actual spider on the primary! Small, dead, but definitely an arachnid. Also, it seems I’d left my main 8x50 finder-scope illuminator switched on, so no illuminated crosshairs for me. The background here is too dark to see the crosshairs without it so I had to resort to defocusing the finder’s objective and using the silhouette that way.

The temperature was 7 degrees C and due to drop to around 4-5, but luckily there was little dew during the session: certainly not enough to affect anything, not even my Telrad which is normally an early casualty.

My first observation, as I was setting up, was a lovely slow long bright meteor heading from high south to low south-east. I was treated to lots of smaller meteors during the night too. I seem to find that I see more meteors outside the traditional constellation-ids than when I go outside to see the official ones.

My equipment tonight was my Orion Optics 12” 1/10 mirror; Baader Diamond Steeltrack focuser with Paracorr2; AZ-EQ6 mount in Alt-Az mode on Planet tripod. I controlled everything with my Nexus DSC, used natively with its wired connection to the mount rather than via WiFi/SkySafari. I’m not sufficiently used to its WiFi option yet to waste a rare session doing trial-and-error.

Anyway, here’s what I looked at. Seeing was so-so, 4-5 out of 10 I’d say. I started my session around 10pm I think. Nothing too ambitious, but enough to overcome the inertia of tring to set up again after a long observing break.

Polaris – almost always my first view, as I generally use it for initial alignment. I love little Polaris B and enjoy the different views of it I get through scopes of different apertures. It’s barely-to-notatall detectable through my 60mm spotting scope at 48x from London, for example. Whereas through the 12” at SQM-L 12.3 it’s really rather bright and blue.

NGC 6543 – Cat’s Eye Nebula. Situated right on the Northern Ecliptic Pole, the vertical axis of the whole Solar System, this is something I thonk I’ve not viewed before. Hubble’s and other pictures show lots of structure and symmetry. All I could see was a quite bright oval patch at 100x with the DeLite 18.2. I upped magnification to 183x with the Delos 10 and it was the same, only bigger. I’ve heard that PNs respond to magnification so I put in the 3.5 for a ridiculous 522x, and sure enough it was the same only bigger but much more blurry. No sign of a central star.

Epsilon Lyrae aka Double-Double – to test the seeing I moved across to Lyra and was  just about able to clean-split the two pairs with my Ethos 13 for 141x. With decent seeing it should be and has been much sharper than this. I stayed with the Ethos 13 for most of the rest of the session, until my traditional “pre-packing-up” tour with the wide-field Nagler 31.

M57 & M27 – Dumbbell & Ring Nebulae – while in this vicinity I quickly ticked off these two. Ring with a green tint. But both bright and beautiful.

Jupiter – Jupiter was far enough around by now that it had cleared my South Western trees, so I had a quick look. Only the two main bands on show and a lot of atmospheric CA so I quickly moved on.

Uranus – I wondered if Uranus would be high enough to clear my Northerly aspect, blocked by my house from this observing position on my patio. Sure enough at nearly 50 degrees up it was plenty high enough, and Uranus was a distinctly greenish bright vivid disc. Really startling and the best I’ve ever seen it I think.

M81 & M82 – Bode’s and Cigar Galaxies – M81 was obvious enough though I didn’t spend long on it, not long enough to try to tease out any spiral. I quickly moved to M81 and its diagonal gap was obvious.

Auriga: M36, 37 and 38 – Auriga was high up so I decided to have a look at these 3 clusters. As soon as I hit “goto” on my Nexus keypad I realized something was wrong! The scope was heading off to completely the wrong place and I had hurriedly to press the “power-off” button before its open end struck the ground. It was cold, I was wearing gloves by then, and somehow I’d got myself onto the “NGC” page rather than the “Messier”. So I’d actually requested it go to NGC 37, an extremely dim lenticular galaxy in the Constellation Phoenix, wherever that is: I’ve never heard of it.

A quick undoing of the clutches, restoration of power and re-alignment, and I was back in Auriga. I am particularly fond of M37, there’s a single prominent red star in amongst all the white ones which I always like to notice.

By now my fingers were getting cold in spite of the gloves, so before packing up, I put in my Nagler 31 giving me 59x, an exit pupil of 5mm (about my maximum) and a field of 1.4 degrees.

I “did” these three clusters (M36. 37 & 38) again to look at them in much wider field, lovely, that red star still there in M37. I also repeated M81/82 to see if they were in the same FoV and they were indeed, lovely again.

M33 – Triangulum Galaxy – I risked sending the mount close to Zenith (well, 70 degrees up actually) to look at M33 in the widest field this scope can give me. I carefully looked at the back end of my scope to look out for “tripod-strike” and was relieved to see it pass literally 2mm from one of its legs! Phew! M33 was unmistakable once I’d panned around to find it. Panning around when pointed that high, even on an alt-az becomes slightly non-intuitive. With averted vision, spirals were easily evident. If I’d gone for it earlier in the evening I might have looked out for NGC 604 and friends, features actually within M33 itself, but I’d have had to get the phone out and I wasn’t keen to hold any more aluminium in my bare fingers, so I left that for another time.

As I type, I could be viewing again the following evening, as it’s clear, but it’s just a bit too windy so I’ll probably resort to sitting in my Dryrobe and 15x56 binoculars in an outside chair after dinner.

A final thought: with the cobwebs and actual ctraetures making home on my mirror it seem that my observing-session : mirror-clean ratio is hovering close to 2:1 at the moment. I might have to fashion some sort of direct mirror-cover to better protect it between sessions.

Cheers, Magnus.

Is that you in the photo Mark? 😄

14 hours ago, Paz said:

+1 for the TV Paracorr 2. I've used that with my f4.6 reflector for years and don't observe without it.

There is also the feathertouch sips which I have heard good things about but I have not used one of those myself so can't comment on those from experience.

Another satisfied pc2 user here.

Revthe Feathertouch sips, it is simply a pc2 integrated into their focuser.

First light for my new Astro-Stuhl. My Intes M603 and Baader focuser looking mainly at Jupiter. Europa’s shadow was evident. Clouds came as forecast then I had to really hurry when the rain started!

What a difference an observing chair makes! Perfectly relaxed able to hold position for as long as you want. 

I’m definitely an owl. My record for getting up is 4pm, no alcohol or prior difficult day involved. Left to my own devices I creep later and later even though I freely admit there’s nothing more beautiful than a gently-coloured pastel dawn. I have to positively arrange things in the mornings to reset my clock. I envy larks.

M

What Stu means by “defo is” is “defocus” … his spellcheck needs collimating 😄

12 hours ago, Dave scutt said:

You sure it wasn't a car head light(only one car head light this is Ireland) as you lay on the floor from too much Guinness 

🙂 Luckily I don’t like Guinness 

I had a particular 2 week trip to 21.8 SW Ireland a couple of years ago. I used to plan those trips with the phase of the moon in mind to maximize the number of dark nights. In that whole trip I glimpsed one star for a few seconds in a cloud gap on a walk back from the pub. So I sympathize. My suggestion: move there, that’s what I did.

M

Shortly after acquiring my LZOS 105/650 f/6.2 scope I tried a direct comparison between my Baader 2” BBHS prism diagonal, and a Revelation 2” dielectric mirror diagonal. I can’t recall the eyepiece I used, but it was the same for both.

I looked at lunar features. With the prism diagonal I could easily see colour-fringes, with the mirror diagonal I could not discern any colour aberration.

Just an extra data-point.

Magnus

First light for my new-for-moi OO VX8 which I picked up yesterday. No collimating tools on a brief UK visit but I’m quite sure the prior owner will have had it collimated very well, and it was a smooth journey. Tonight was clear-ish, I only looked at Jupiter, nice detail on view but I don’t know the features/names. Saturn and Titan and very quickly Luna as well. But a veil of cloud came and that was it.

I was using eyepieces borrowed from my neighbour (which I gave him a year ago) mainly a BCO 10mm for 90x, nice eyepiece the first I’ve used one.

Something I collected from @Grumpy Martian yesterday. OO with 1/10 grade mirror. A big upgrade to my existing 8” (a SW 200p which I’ll make available here in due course).

I’ll need to swap in my Baader Diamond Steeltrack focuser.

Magnus

The combination of the Coathanger against the backdrop and that dark nebula (Anchor?) is amazing. Lovely picture.

M

I bought that same focuser as an "upgrade" for my then new skymax 180. It was terrible, and your word "bounce" describes it perfectly. The fine-focus wheel just wasn't "direct" at all, bouncy and spongy. I did try some surgery on it, and (long story) by the end a hammer was involved, trying to extract a pin: I effectively destroyed it. I still have all the bits, and even if it were still whole I wouldn't have the conscience to sell it on to anybody, it's so bad.

M

Edit: the Skywatcher/OVL/Revelation (all the same I think) dual-speed Crayfords are much, much better (and cheaper!).

That spin test sent shivers down my spine … I was fearing that it was actually unscrewing from the mount with everything about to collapse! Thankfully not! 😀

Seriously though does it have eq-5 or eq-6 style attachment? Your two tripods both look to be eq-6.

Also if you can remember back to your AYOii days it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the comparison (I have an AYOii)

V nice, Magnus

Welcome to the recently-moved-to-the-dark-side club! Not sure how I missed your post 2 weeks ago either.

Can we assume you’re well on the way now to being cured of AP 🤪?

Cheers Magnus